On a cold autumn evening, we were looking at our neighbor’s newly painted house and admiring it, trying to guess the shade of the color of the paint. My ten (almost eleven) year old said ” I wish we could round up colors. It would be easy to say what color it is.” I know he has been doing a lot of rounding up of decimals in school these days , but rounding up the colors?

The world has a million colors and all of them have their beauty. I completely agree that it gets confusing when we see so many colors on a shade card and try to decide the color scheme for a room. In fact our ability to distinguish between them completely depends on our appetite/ palate for colors. I remember seeing two shades of white and saying they look just the same. My designer friend gave me a look of disbelief and said they are as different as apples and oranges. I knew better than to argue with her about colors. I couldn’t tell the difference even if I stood upside down.

I also remember listening to a podcast where they said we have lost some shades of blue because we did not name those colors and did not preserve them.

From colors, my thoughts jumped to emotions. Perhaps because we have always related emotions to colors. I asked myself how it would be if we rounded up emotions too. What if we only have the basic emotions of –
Joy and Sadness
Anger and Fear
Expectation and Surprise
Acceptance and Disgust
Would we be able to express our actual feelings by rounding it up to these 8 emotions?

This question led me into reading up about emotions. This is what I learnt in my quest:

Managing our emotions is not always easy. It is said that the ability to name and communicate one’s feelings plays a big role in managing the emotions. This ability is called Emotional Literacy. Those with strong emotional literacy skills have greater awareness of their own emotions, and those of others. This plays a crucial role in having healthy relationships with people.

Psychologist Robert Plutchik developed the popular emotions wheel and it is known as the Plutchik wheel. According to Plutchik’s theory, these basic emotions can intensify, become milder, or combine with each other to produce any emotional state.

In emotional literacy, we are talking about the exact opposite of rounding up. We are talking about getting as specific as possible. It is about having the vocabulary to name the exact feeling.

Those shades and mixtures of different emotions is what we experience in our life. I am glad it is not rounded up.

I look out of the window and see the newly painted house against the myriad colors of fall, and feel so grateful that the creator did not decide to round up the colors either.

Rounding up of numbers is a tool used to reach at an approximate answer and to make the calculations simpler. It clearly doesn’t work for colors or with emotions. So let’s enjoy and embrace the different shades of life because that is what makes it fascinating.

Image by anncapictures from Pixabay

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